Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter is sustaining what has become a long recent line of effective and efficient Wildcats quarterbacks. / Melina Vastola, USA TODAY Sports

by Dan Wolken, USA TODAY Sports

by Dan Wolken, USA TODAY Sports

USA TODAY Sports college football reporter Dan Wolken has loaded up the car and hit the road, where he'll check out more than a dozen college football camps over the next two weeks. Each day, he'll file a vignette about what he observed and detail the significant storylines heading into the season.

Next stop: Wisconsin

KENOSHA, Wis. â?? You would think the natural instinct for most coaches, especially one coming off the best season of his career, would be to keep everything the same. Pat Fitzgerald, at age 38, already is the winningest coach in Northwestern history, so what he's been doing up to this point clearly works. He didn't have to change a thing.

But roughly a month before camp, Fitzgerald made the fairly unconventional decision to eliminate two-a-days completely from preseason practice. Though the NCAA is already a decade into restrictions on two-a-days, and the NFL eliminated them completely as part of the 2011 collective bargaining agreement, most coaches still see them as useful, especially for conditioning purposes.

But with more and more focus on player safety, Fitzgerald simply sees his decision as a way to get ahead of the trend.

"I'm not a guy like, 'Hey back in 1948 this is the way they did it,' so we've got to do it this way. I'm the other way around," Fitzgerald said. "I think we're going that direction. It's already there in the NFL, and just looking at that and seeing from a modeling standpoint where we're at today as a program with 15 returning starters and our amount of depth, how can we keep our guys healthy?"

The Wildcats, coming off a 10-3 season and their first bowl win since 1948, scrimmaged Saturday in front of about 200 fans and are close to finishing a nine-day stretch of training on the campus of Wisconsin-Parkside, about an hour north of Chicago. It's a tradition that began when Fitzgerald was a player at Northwestern, but this camp has been more about the mental side of the game and trying to avoid being worn down for the season opener at California. The Wildcats, ranked No. 22 in the preseason USA TODAY Sports Coaches Poll as well as the Associated Press poll, also have a tougher Big Ten schedule than last year, with Ohio State and Wisconsin replacing Indiana and Penn State.

"We've had a lot of meetings, a lot of learning the system mentally and not putting us through so much physical stress sin practice and things like that," senior quarterback Kain Colter said. "From what I hear from the older guys, camp used to be such a grind, people used to get really injured, and ever since I've been here it's gotten less physically demanding (each year). The focus has been keeping guys healthy and having fresh legs going into that first game. Especially this year with a lot of experienced guys who know the system, it's not as important to see what they can do."

This team's experience and maturity were undoubtedly among the reasons Fitzgerald decided to eliminate two-a-days, but that does not mean players haven't been pushed. Northwestern is blocking and tackling every day during preseason practice, and Fitzgerald said the reps his team got last year in two-a-days were essentially just built into this year's practices and spread out over the course of the camp.

"We made this decision in the offseason and we went harder in spring ball," he said. "We pushed them harder in the summer. Then when we made the final decision about a month before training camp, I met with the leadership council and said here's my plan and here's where you guys need to go the last month of the summer for the intensity of our workouts to get yourselves in great shape."

We'll know soon whether it pays off, but don't be surprised if Northwestern is 4-0 on Oct. 5 when Ohio State comes to Evanston, Ill., for a game that could define the Big Ten race. Though fans are now used to Northwestern being good â?? it's now five consecutive bowl games and counting â?? the Wildcats still aren't talked about much as a national factor.

Even after beating Mississippi State in the Gator Bowl and returning the bulk of that team, Northwestern probably doesn't get as much credit as it deserves for its consistency as a program. That would change with a win over Ohio State.

"Our product has some sustainability to it now," athletics director Jim Phillips said.

One big reason for that is that Northwestern has had no significant gaps in quarterback play. From Brett Basanez to C.J. Bacher to Mike Kafka to Dan Persa and now the tandem of Kain Colter and Trevor Siemian, it's a long list of guys who can move the team down the field.

Fitzgerald credits offensive coordinator Mick McCall and his diligence in recruiting. The way Northwestern recruits quarterbacks, each assistant will identify prospects in their area of the country, and McCall's sole focus in recruiting is to whittle that list down and evaluate who the school should target.

"We'll never offer a quarterback he doesn't see throw live," Fitzgerald said. "Ideally I'd like to have both of us there so we can point-counterpoint. But we got ahead of that a little bit, so now as we go into the fall and we go into next spring's recruiting he's only seeing the quarterbacks we're interested in seeing throw and get to know everything about that young man to being a leader of the program. Because what we do in the spread offense, that's what he is. Whether he likes it or not, that's the expectation, so we've got to really investigate that kid and I want Mick doing it because he's the expert and we have our blueprint as a program of what we're looking for."

The next one could be Matt Alviti, a four-star recruit who ran a similar spread system at his Park Ridge, Ill., high school and looked promising in the scrimmage. Northwestern has another four-star committed for the 2014 class in Clayton Thorson, and Fitzgerald said they're already working off a list of 35 kids for the 2015 class.

"I think sometimes people make mistakes (recruiting quarterbacks) because they say, 'Wow he's got a big arm,'" Fitzgerald said. "But does he fit character-wise, leadership-wise? We need him to do both. He has to be mobile on his feet, also be able to throw the ball and be a leader. If he's not a leader in high school, why do you think he'd be a leader in college? This isn't rocket science. It's football. It's human interaction. So that's where I believe we've been successful."

Dan Wolken, a national college football reporter for USA TODAY Sports, is on Twitter @DanWolken.

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